Making her long-awaited return to narrative filmmaking with Like a Dream, Hong Kong Second Wave director Clara Law talks to Edmund Lee about Daniel Wu, the importance of “finding the connection”, and not knowing what the Second Wave means.

Clara Law’s life journey is almost as convoluted as her characters’. Born in Macau and moving to Hong Kong aged ten, Law went on to become one of our city’s leading filmmakers of the 1980s and 90s, with efforts such as Autumn Moon (1992) and Temptation of a Monk (1993), before emmigrating to Australia in 1995, where she made the acclaimed Floating Life (1996). Her latest work Like a Dream, starring Daniel Wu and mainland Chinese actress Yolanda Yuan as a pair of would-be lovers lost between their dreams and waking lives, is the writer-director’s first fiction film since her 2000 fable, The Goddess of 1967.

As Wu enthusiastically tells me, he can still vividly remember the time when he watched Law’s 1989 film The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus in an arthouse cinema in the States. “I was only 17, but I could already see that Clara is a very special director. She does what she wants to do, and doesn’t follow any kind of trends.” And as Wu found out to his own dismay, Law’s unwavering artistic pursuit is not for the faint-hearted. “It’s like being in an army,” Wu laughs while recalling the new film’s 18-hour-day filming schedule.

Daniel just told me that you are, and I quote, “the hardest working director I’ve ever worked with. Period.”
Right. [Smiles]

And he mentioned that he lost a lot of weight during the shoot.
He did it deliberately too! Because he knew that by the end of the film he needed to look very hagged. I think it was a very hard task working on this film. At the same time he was also trying to be in the character. He was very depressed [even] after the film was done.

So how did this film project begin in the first place?
I don’t normally answer questions like this. [Laughs] Of course, every project has its way of beginning; but the most important thing is that with this project, Eddie [Fong, Law’s producer, regular co-writer, and husband] and I are in what we call a new phase of creative work, which is very different from what we would have done before. In the past, our way of creating is more analytical: okay, this is the theme that we wanted to do, and this is what we had to explore, and, let’s say, I wanted to explore the dark side of the human being – so how do we work out a story? It was more like that. I think after The Goddess of 1967, we felt a kind of dissatisfaction. I felt as if we were not able to say everything we wanted to say, or that we were actually there when we reached the end of the script. And so we forfeit all that we had done before, all our usual ways of practice and creativity, and just rely on our intuition.

Just intuition?
Intuition, I think, is totally from within. It’s as if you are just trying to let your own voice come out. You know, we have a room where we do our [creative work]. And we come into the room everyday with a totally blank mind. We let ourselves come into this room very clean, like a white piece of paper, and we let ourselves feel. We felt we were able to trust our instinct. It was more like letting yourself be tempted to go into this direction and see how it evolves. You let this character come out, and then somehow this character would take you by the hand and lead you through this journey. Of course, the danger of this way of working is that it may not lead you anywhere. You may come to the middle or the third part of the script and can’t go anywhere. You’ve then lost three months of your life getting nowhere. But, so far, it has been good.

What about your first inspiration for this film? Where did you get that?
It was probably when we [Law and Fong] first read this story in Chinese literature, where this guy saw this girl in his dream. From there on, we thought: if someone does dream of someone like this, what happens if the other [person] also dreams of her or him?

Were you influenced by other films when you wrote the story? I was reminded a little bit early in the film of Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique. Your protagonist’s subsequent choice between the real girl and the ‘dream girl’ also slightly resembles Vertigo.
No. I mean if it was there, it was there. I actually have never watched Vertigo. Eddie has watched Vertigo – but it really doesn’t matter. If you were influenced, maybe that was there, but it was never conscientious. It is [more about] whether the emotions or the experience that the characters were going through was authentic. And if it’s true and honest, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s the shadow of this film or that film.

It seems to be a recurrent arrangement in your films, as also in Autumn Moon and The Goddess of 1967, that you’re having one guy and one girl setting out to explore the world and learn about themselves. Is that related to something personal?
No, I mean, this is supposed to be part of life: girl meets girl… [I mean] boy meets girl, and then what happens? Maybe girl meets girl and boy meets boy. [Laughs] I don’t count my films like this; I suppose one of my major concerns is what it means to exist – not in a philosophical way, but in a curious way. This is something that was in me even as a kid: I was always having this experience of actually looking from outside of myself, at myself, and wondering what this person was doing then. Another [of my] major concern is that there’s a lot of ugliness in the world around us, but I also feel that there’s a lot of beauty in human beings. I want to find those magical moments when you see true beauty.

It’s interesting you put it that way, because your protagonists are often living in their little world, being completely oblivious to the capitalistic world outside.
I think they’re threatened by the capitalistic outside world, so that the only way they can survive is to be cocooned in their little world. It’s the threat of the modern way of living that they are up against – all the time. They want to find warmth, and they want to be connected. It’s probably the journey of finding the connection that matters to them. I think a lot of us are very lonely and unable to feel connected.

In Hong Kong’s cinema history, you are regarded as a member of our Second Wave cinema, which also includes the likes of Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-wai.
I don’t know why it is the Second Wave or the Third Wave. I don’t know how many waves we had, or whether there ever was a wave! I think the Hong Kong cinema has never been… how do you say it… [Pauses]

Did you feel part of something when you were working in our industry back then?
Not really.

So this was more of a scholarly categorisation?
No… You know, I always felt like I was on the periphery. [Laughs] I did not choose it, but I was always trying to find something that is more original. The Hong Kong cinema is more commercial-oriented, and it’s never been easy for the odd ones to [find their way]. There’s another thing we have to be very aware of. I mean, it’s easy to say “cinema” or “film” as just one word. [But then] in cinema, there’re the totally commercial genre films, and then there’re what they call the arthouse films.

Would you categorise your works as arthouse films?
I think it’s more the auteur work – more the author there. I did not set out not to entertain. I think I want to entertain too, but I also want it to be more than just pure entertainment. I want the audience to be not just the passive ones, who let the film be totally forgotten when they walk out of the cinema. I hope that it’ll be something that they would go back to reminisce and think more about.

Do you see yourself as an auteur?
I think so, yeah. I’m not a hired hand. I initiate my own projects. I’m passionate about making films because I can still express myself or try to find… I think I want to find the connection through films.

How do you want this new film to be received?
Well, I have been away from Hong Kong for so long, and my films have never been publicly released in China. I know that people do have their DVDs in their private collection, and I was told that in China, Temptation of a Monk was popular among these people who would try to look at it on pirated DVDs. [Laughs] So I’m coming in with a totally open mind. I don’t know what it’s going to be like; I do hope that I’m now finding more audience, especially in the Chinese market. I believe that my ideal audience [consists of people] that are not happy with just [entertainment]. I’m hoping that this film would find that audience, and that they would go and watch the film in the cinema. Because I think the film is a visual journey, and on the print, it is different from when you’re watching on a DVD.

Like a Dream opens May 20.